House with garage for sale in centre of Mühlhausen, Thüringen

This is my second house. We have just completed it (October 2007), using largely the same firms as I used for my first, because they were really excellent, especially engineer Dietmar Frohn. I changed to a different carpenter for the entire roof construction and to a different electrician whom I now wish I had used for my own house. This time it is not a reconstruction in half-timbering because the previous house on the site was in too bad a state and the authorities insisted on a newbuild. But in fact it works well on that corner and we thus got to include a garage. Parking is at a premium here, as in England. The position is fantastic, just inside the walls and at the bottom of a very pretty little paved street on the east side of the house- see picture.

If you stand on the ramparts outside the walls and look from the west you can just make out the house on the corner of Wahlstrasse along which you enter the city.

It has a small sundial on the south face.

If interested, please write to my email address: rachelkf@googlemail.com. The price is 150,000 Euros, or £118,200.00 at the current exchange rate of 1 EUR = £0.78. This is for outright ownership, not leasehold or any other variation. For the process of selling I shall have the help of the estate agent friend who has acted for me on several occasions.

Now for the inside view. The story of the whole building process will follow shortly in a further section with lots of detailed pictures. After all, you want to know what your future home is made of!

The front door is an original historic pine door restored by the carpenter who did all the old doors in my own house. The entrance hall has an Italian granite floor and the staircase has been handmade in local beech with Carolina pine bannisters. It gives the house a sunny appearance.

The ground floor (no cellar) contains the garage, a utilities room and a WC with hand basin. There is a large space under the stairs for storage. There is a doorbell with electric entry system and lights that come on via a detector as you enter. Beside the front door are the telephone and cable TV connections, but I have also had a cable laid to the top floor in case a satellite dish is required. The garage contains the meters for gas, water and electricity. At the back is an area for a work top with several electric sockets.

On the first floor are a double bedroom and a smaller one and a bathroom with bath, basin, toilet and shower. The Frank Born who did the tiling is absolutely first class - one of those who complete on time and don't have to be chased up for silly details. The wall tiles are in pale beige, the bathroom floor in darker beige, beautiful straight rows and clean grouting.

All the rooms have large pine-framed, double-glazed windows with rolling shutters on the outside. The six-pane windows, which open inwards, have a fixed two-pane section at the bottom to allow for plants (ie. so you don't have to remove them every time you open the windows). There are TV and telephone sockets in both the bedrooms as well as in the sitting-room.

I have always loved sloping ceilings and the feeling of being at the top of a building. This why I planned the house to have the living area on the top floor. You can look down on the street scene and across the rooftops. In Mühlhausen the rooftops are tiled in all shades of red and all at different angles, higgledy-piggledy, with church spires and old factory chimneys poking up in between - a very paintable view.

As you come up the second flight of stairs you turn left onto the landing. Above the stairs is an openable skylight and let into the ceiling over the landing is a trap door to the attic, which just large enough to serve as useful storage space. The door on the left opens into a small room containing the gas central-heating boiler and hot water tank, plus enough space to store maybe a vacuum cleaner and other such items. The system is an "intelligent" one, i.e. it has an external sensor to tell it what the outside temperature is, and a "condensing" one, that is, it recovers the heat produced as water vapour and thus prevents nearly all of it from disappearing up the chimney.

On the right are the kitchen and the sitting-room. Don't expect to see a fully equipped kitchen. It is customary in Germany for people to have a kitchen installed to suit their individual taste, so I have simply put in all the necessary connections for water and power, and a stretch of wall-tiling at worktop level. The window is a large, deepset dormer with a wide sill outside ideal for plants of perhaps herbs. Towards the sitting-room there is a hatch so that whoever is working away at the cooking or washing-up can keep an eye on whoever is lazing in front of telly, or even pass the odd caustic remark about missing one's favourite programme. If I were going to live there I think I would have one of those cosy German corner seats to the left of the window, and a row of nice-looking wall-cupboards.

My favourite room is the sitting-room because of its partly sloping ceilings and the view out of the three windows. It is slightly L-shaped and as you go in you have the kitchen hatch on your right and another large dormer window opposite the door facing south. In this corner you could possibly have your dining-table.

Turning left you face the two windows in the gable end of the house facing east and getting a lot of sun from early to mid-morning. It becomes instantly clear why I chose to put the sitting-room on the top floor. The north side of the room is intended to be where you have your comfortable television corner. TV and telephone sockets are in the wall left of the double window. Because there is a metre of vertical wall before the sloping bit starts you are in no danger of hitting your head when you stand up, and there is a stretch of wall without slope for a high cupboard or similar.

From the double window you look north-east across the rooftops to the beautiful Gothic St. Mary's Church, and south-east along Wahlstrasse towards the centre of Mühlhausen. The windows on the south side look across at one of the fine old half-timbered town-houses on the other side of the Wahlstrasse.

Originally the site is thought to have been a corner of a much larger 11th-century property, built upon at a time when the Romanesque style was at its height in Germany, whereas England and France had already moved on to Gothic. It was probably divided up into smaller plots in the late Middle Ages, when Mühlhausen was already a free self-governing Imperial City, answerable only to the German Emperor.

The house, which was demolished to make way for my new one, had under it remnants, much interfered with, of a late mediaeval cellar. The roof of the building contained some beams that possibly originated from that same period but that had been re-used to form a small artisan's dwelling at the beginning of the 19th century. In the Mühlhausen Public Record Office are stored the names and addresses of all the inhabitants from the early 19th century. Quite a variety of trades are listed for this particular house, among them two master weavers, a master shoemaker and a master tailor as well as a a comb-maker, a barber, a metal-worker and several labourers.

In the section of this website called The workforce - all the firms who built my house I have given much space to the individual firms who built my first house. In the stone base on the street front I got a local stonemason to place a plaque with the names of the main five firms and this has generated a lot of interest, since it had never been done before. The general opinion seems to be that it is good to preserve the names of those who work on the buildings of this historic city. In a smaller way I have continued this idea with a small plaque on the east face of this second house, in the hope that future owners will take an interest, too.

With great care not to affect the two neighbouring houses the firm of Kullmann demolished the sad little wreck of a house and left me a cleared site and the crumbling remains of the cellar. Dr Alexander Gotschol of IBEG, who specialise in soil mechanics, came and did a subsurface investigation, as his father had done for my first project. Mühlhausen sits on some minor geological complications as well as being threaded through with a number of streams and I was anxious to avoid possible subsidence one day. Dr Gotschol gave the go-ahead to build but advised putting in deeper foundations. This we did and decided against restoring the cellar, which would anyway have been so small as not to be very useful.

When the excavations started there was a brief examination of the site by one of the local archaeologists. Since the ground had been considerably disturbed several times in the last hundred years no-one wanted to investigate further, to our relief, but we did find a dark layer of burnt matter, probable evidence of one of Mühlhausen's many big fires in the past, and a reminder that, while timber-frame buildings are picturesque, brick built houses are less worrying to owners like me with a tendency to imagine nasty happenings.

Meanwhile Engineer Dietmar Frohn and I were completing the detailed floor plans and getting in tenders for the raw building work. That is to say, Herr Frohn was doing all the work while I drew sketches of what I wanted. He drew up extremely detailed specifications and in the process taught me all sorts of things about building that I had missed during the first project. This time I was determined to end up understanding and not just passively observing.

The load-bearing walls are 36 cm thick. They are built of Poroton, large blocks with vertical cavities, good for insulation, and laid on thin-bed mortar applied with a spreading machine like glue. The vertical ends interlock and the whole system reminds one of Lego bricks. Wienerberger, the huge firm who make them, was founded in 1819 in an area south of Vienna that provides just the right sort of clay for bricks.

The process of creating the concrete floors is interesting to watch. A crane arrives with floor sections made exactly to measure and hoists them into place onto supporting props with much careful pulling and pushing by the bricklayers. The pictures below show the concrete ceiling sections in place with steel reinforcements and ducts for power cables, the liquid concrete being pumped onto these and the underside of the ceiling with its supports during hardening and the cable ducts coming through the concrete ready for the electrician to start work.